Don't deal with yourself harshly

Don't push, don't hassle, don't say "the world is going to end. if you don't perform." Relax.

How does one do that, and not feel strangely, obtusely that one is going to be left behind? I have been very laidback lately. I have kind of changed my priorities, from being motivated and charged and hyper to being slow, lost and unsure. Confused. Because that is the way I am. I can behave in different ways - social pressure, social ambition pushing me - but I can't be that.

So this past month, I have done nothing on time. I have not ticked much off my task-list, I have forgotten and forgiven, not bothered to get angry.

I have enjoyed drawing again, have drawn a lot. And I have watched myself. I will not do things which take me away from being peaceful. At any cost.

Living in Mumbai can be a hassle. So little space, such long distances, high-pressure work. Can I survive? Maybe. I don't want to do too much. Just as much as I can. Get rid of my debt, learn about things I pretend to know a lot about... be lax and easy with myself. Be good in my relationships...

Mumbai is in a way - fun to drift through. Fun to move around, not pretending to be in a rush, and not bent on getting something done.

I will be staying as a paying guest near my office. I have my own house in Ahmedabad. Does it puzzle me - why am I here? what am I doing? Sometimes. Otherwise its clear. I am here to practise, doing things, being things, seeing things. Practise meeting people, bonding with people in a different way. In a way, which feels honest, personal.

First in Flight

(The picture is from Erika's opening reception at Barriques. It isn't of her work - this is the selection of empty wine glasses at the end of the night. Right after I took it, a friend said he was glad I took it, since he didn't have his camera and had been staring at it for awhile, appreciating the light and wishing he had brought his camera. It was, fittingly, the last photo. Closing time!)

Last night a friend and I began an 8 week course with local Professor Richard Davis on Racial Healing. The man is chock full of boundless, loving energy, and is definitely another teacher I was asking for without even knowing it consciously. We started the course, which is mindfully based in meditation and listening silently and respectfully to each others' understandings of and experiences with racism, with a video called Color of Fear. Veterans of the course - or rather, I should say - die-hard come again fans, call the experience "story hour with Richard Davis". I have been craving more and more places where people come to listen to one another. I certainly strive to create it in my classes, and I think I succeed well. I always love to see it manifested again in other ways, especially around something as explicitly important to address as racism.

Mindfulness. Someone recently described to me that trying to understand animals is like trying to understand God, which I took in the most general sense - trying to describe mindfulness is similar. The irony of using language for it can feel nearly sacreligious. Yet, it is done, again and again, mostly through stories. The group Blackalicious has a song - First in Flight - in which they describe everyone's knowledge as being just that - the first time ever, beginner's mind. First ever, every time. I have known for years I was coming back to this, to the beginning, to the emptiness I have run from, struggled to get away from, for so long. I can sit with it now, sometimes, or look at it from across the room. The big, pink, empty elephant. Each time is the first time, it feels like.

Tonight a new friend who attended my writing class asked how I deal with pedagogy versus experience in class. I told him about one experience, from tonight, after class, in which a woman had described an experience of hers for which I knew the exact Buddhist description. But it wasn't the right moment to share that. I just felt that. Ironically, the decision to let experience speak for someone, or to someone, is intuitive, and itself based in experience. This is for sure the beginning of a long journey for me, and I am so far loving it. There's nothing like that thrill in the beginning, when you first take off, your face empty and open, wings spread, launching up and out and over.

Water

So the bookstore has my news. I announced I will be leaving by June 1 to them last week, and then I went off to a mostly fun conference in order to get some space from the store. Everyone is generally supportive of the "Miriam-goes-to-grad-school-and-teaches-too" idea, though my plans aren't exactly "hardcore activist". Dealing with me leaving, logistically, and in terms of community, will be more complex, but we have a few months to do it. I am confident I can transfer most of what I know in a transparent way (which is needed, anyway) to the system here so as not to leave the rest of staff and volunteer collective in lurch.

And I feel relieved to have made official announcement. It's been quite the process. Honestly, I felt pretty shitty the couple of days after announcing: very doubtful of self and path, etc, then I went to teach, and, big surprise, I felt much better. Sticking to the moment.

And here is the plan: I am applying to Naropa's Contemplative Education Master's Program. I am required as an applicant to have an active teaching practice. I was nervous to ask them if me teaching independently "counted" and they replied that yes, oh yes, it sounds just right. (I am, after all, teaching contemplative writing, so private or not, it makes sense it would count). Applications are due end of January. Then, I sit around and wait, prep to leave my job, teach a bunch more, as much as I can. If Naropa takes me, I will plan to travel before going to Boulder for a month in the summer (I am due there for one month out of each summer, but otherwise the course is a long-distance one), then for a month in the fall. I want to go to India and see Prayas (with a sojourn to Tibet), as well as Australia to see good friends in Perth. On a likely separate journey, Tobias has just fixed up a new warehouse flat in East End, London, and so I think I am due to go back that way over the pond in order to check up on the Euro contingency and allies. So that will be another trip sometime this next year. If Naropa doesn't take me, same idea, only I might make all the travel at once, over summer, when teaching is in a lull, and come back and teach and do whatever else I can. Honestly, I am quite confident about Naropa. I think it is a good match. But one must always have contingency plans...

I am in the water between islands. This last weekend I was at a cooperative business conference, and I flailed in my attachment to responsiblity, anger, aggression about control. I took stuff out on myself and other people. It is interesting to watch the release when I let go and swim free. When my mother died, 9 years ago this January, I couldn't stand to swim free. Now, I practice each week, with some conflict or other, letting go and giving in. Then, when the big stuff happens, swimming doesn't feel like drowning, except for those first few minutes; arms in the air, legs rigid from expectation, breath tight and hard. Then I breathe, take some water in and kick it back out, move my arms and swim. Water. I'm an earth sign. This is a new thing, to chose to drop the islands and float on the sea. But it feels natural. After all, I am 90% water, right?
: )

Spaciousness

(Photo from Castro in San Francisco)



There is a characteristic of the Midwest, which before dealing with recent difficulties, had always disturbed me. The fields. The open-ness. The lack of mountains or even high hills. Sometimes I felt comforted that I could see so many miles ahead and back, sometimes that felt like the wrong kind of distraction. Yet it is true. Mountains intimidate me.

But today, I appreciate the spaciousness in the Midwest. The lack of head clogging, visually. The ability for hard things to face to float for a bit before me, not be crammed in by strangers or even by skyscrapers. When I was in the Bay Area recently, I took a lot of photos of space (not surprisingly, a major element in Miksang conceptual work), and really appreciated what space I could find there. Here, it is everywhere. And for now, it is a strange comfort - being that space, with all of it's motility, is not comfortable at all in some ways, it is a sailboat on the sea, always in motion. Yet, once one rests into movement, there is a comfort. Not comfort in the sense of lulling. Just, spaciousness.

Secrets

I love to bike, drunk.

I love biking anyway, and was slightly disappointed in my recent trip out to the Bay Area not to do it more. I had a spectacular visit, mind you. But I do read Chris Carlsson's blog on LiP Magazine's site
(www.lipmagazine.org/ccarlsson) involving, amongst other things like good radical books, about biking in the Bay, and I lust. Nothing beats biking.

Tonight, I spent the evening digesting my trip out to the Bay Area with a coworker, Moises. We caught up on store gossip and issues (this following a Board of Directors meeting) and personal bruhaha that had developed in each others' lives after the last couple of weeks' absence, over a few drinks at a local haunt. I implored him to visit La Mision ASAP, as Madison is not the source of solidarity he may be seeking 24/7. He said back in Oaxaca he heard constant rumor of this Mecca, this Sugar Skull Day of Dead Rivera Quality Murals Mecca, before he ever even came to the States and had a wife and two babies and a life in Madison. So we'll find a way, but he says *I* have to get to Oaxaca, first. I'm up for stats like that!

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Missing Scotch, the cat, has gotten harder. I have sent out invitations for a Cat Wake/ Day of the Dead/ Naked Ladies party for November 4th. It has been a long time since Erika and I have thrown a party, and the last Naked Ladies party (despite me taking a roll of pictures without flash, none of which turned out) was a total ball.
However, it is when I am in the middle of a day, no thoughts for her at all, that my periphery catches her, out of twenty years' worth of habit, and I cry out, suddenly, and feel stark.

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I find I need my need for people more without Scotch around. I am much more atune to it. I also need my need for things like, as silly and adolescent as they are, biking drunk, middle of the night, down the middle of the street, laughing with Moy over the trifles of aggression, the moon peering down over the cold fall Wisconsin air, laughing back at us, more.

How could losing a cat do that? I spent a lot of today, ostensibly my day "off", looking at photos of her. New photos, the last roll I took, the day before I knew I would be putting her to sleep, and classic oldies I have seen countless times over the 20 years I had her. Drawings from my "zine" about recent events in my life. I sensed just how deep all of this is. And also, finally, today, something clicked: that she is still here, that I miss her body, not her spirit. I stopped worrying that she couldn't find me, which I didn't realize was a concern until I stopped having the concern (so many things are like this!).

I am far from done with grief, but in a process like this, it is a relief to find a step to check off the list, for now.

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Alongside personal changes, I continue to be concerned for Prayas and his part of this world, and the Earthquake live-out after-flash nastiness. It is true: Katrina brought it home to me. How long has it been, as an adult, paying awareness to these things, that I had so carefully noted the outcomes of serious lack of preparation (read: unnatural disaster) for "natural disasters", intellectually, without really *feeling* it? Today they are still reporting negotiations that will last likely til the end of the month between Pakistan- and India-controlled Kashmir: who will take the dead? Fine. Hard enough.
Try who will take the living.

Meanwhile, there is little to nothing out there about Guatemala's recent hurricane.

Times like these I regret having learned French over Spanish, though honestly studying post-colonialism in former French colonies has proved far more progressive and intriguing than what I can get from former Spanish colonies.

To be up on disaster. On crisis. As if knowing who is dead, as if knowing who is killing who or which bureaucratic windfall caused the demise of this village or that township, will fix it in retrospect. I am not insinuating that it doesn't offer insight or prevention. Rather, that disaster, crisis, has so much more to teach us about ourselves, what we see and do not see, what we refuse and accept, about daily life, about cycles, than what we see in that moment; BBC's special report, man jumping from Twin Towers, Tsunami, Tsunami, Tsunami. It is certainly not intended to be all about us. And yet, how can we ignore that what we see in the report, what our media REPORTS - is all about what we don't see in daily life? Would we really be that shocked if we opened our eyes more often? Would I?

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It is still true, though. My favorite former secret. I *do* love to bike. Drunk.